“Underreported” is an Understatement

The Washington Times is beginning a series of editorials on “underreported good news from Iraq.” This is, of course, something the right-leaning half of the blogosphere has been up to for some time. Today’s editorial focuses on education and Iraq’s economy:

Primary-school enrollment has jumped 20 percent over the Saddam years, according to the Brookings Institution’s Iraq Index. In a country where 22 percent of adults never attended school, according to the International Monetary Fund, this is a momentous change. It’s also a change going almost entirely unreported by U.S. news organizations. ***

Iraq’s GDP rebounded by an estimated 50 percent in 2004, according to the IMF, mostly due to increased oil revenues. About one-third of Iraqis are unemployed — an alarming rate — but this is sigificantly better than two years ago, when half or more of Iraqis were unemployed. A Lexis-Nexis search shows that the terms “Iraq” and “GDP” or “Gross Domestic Product” appeared together in the above papers in just 10 articles in the last month. Only two actually discussed Iraq’s GDP.